‘New Amsterdam’ EPs on Reynolds’ Relationship, Bloom’s Secret & Iggy’s Choice

Drs. Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) and Helen Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) finally getting together wasn’t the only major moment of the New Amsterdam Season 3 finale. Dr. Floyd Reynolds (Jocko Sims) accepted a promotion, only to find out it came from the husband of the woman he’s been seeing, Dr. Lyn Malvo (Frances Turner). The pair have an open marriage. Dr. Lauren Bloom (Janet Montgomery) risked her career to get her girlfriend Leyla (Shiva Kalaiselvan) a residency spot at the hospital. And Dr. Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine) decided he’s done seeing patients.

“Everyone’s in a hopefully beautiful place by the end of the season,” executive producer David Schulner tells TV Insider. “Everyone has exactly what they always wanted. [But] sometimes a new beginning or getting everything you wanted is going to be a lot more than you bargained for.”

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So what’s next? It won’t be an easy journey for anyone.

Reynolds’ Complicated Love Story

Despite initially fighting his attraction to Lyn because he knew about her (open) marriage, by the finale, the two were very much … as together as they can be in the situation? Then, the Chair of General Surgery, Dr. Claude Baptiste (Andre Blake), offered him the position of Deputy Chair of Surgery … and Reynolds met his wife, Lyn. As you probably expect, he won’t be handling this all that well in Season 4.

“We live in a world where storytelling in film and television is so much about relationships, about longing,” executive producer and director Peter Horton says. “So much of our storytelling is about love stories. We already did Reynolds falling in love with Evie [Margot Bingham] and being engaged and all of that stuff.” (Fun fact: Season 2 originally ended with Reynolds and Evie getting married in “a big wedding, a big celebration,” Schulner reveals. The pandemic changed all their plans.)

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Just like happened with the chemistry between Eggold and Agyeman in the pilot, they took note of what they saw when Sims and Turner were on screen together and that allowed them to do something different and unpredictable. “We just figured we have to go down that road and tell that story and see where that relationship can go,” Horton explains. “You see in that scene under the umbrella in Episode 13 the longing, and so what’s a good obstacle for the longing in his relationship? How about she’s married to another man, but it’s not illicit in that it’s an open marriage, but as with anything like that, it’s so much more complicated it’s initially intended to be.”

This situation results in quite a few questions for the writers to tackle moving forward. “What’s it like if you have someone who’s agreed with their husband to have an open marriage, but has never done anything about it before and is ambivalent herself and yet she’s really drawn to Reynolds? And here’s Reynolds, who has this idea of what he wants for a marriage and life but is magnetized by this woman and he can’t let her go. How does that work? Where does that go?” Horton asks.

Bloom’s Major Risk for Love

Upon facing her girlfriend potentially moving away when she didn’t score a residency spot at New Amsterdam, Bloom went to see if there was anything she could do — and found out there was: a bribe. It would mean risking her career, she argued, but by episode’s end, Leyla had a position at the hospital.

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“I think Bloom did the wrong thing for the right reason,” Schulner says. “Hopefully everyone feels for her in the same way that the writers did and the way Janet portrayed her. My heart goes out to her. It’s easy to judge her decision, but coming out of this last year and a half, I’m not going to judge anyone’s right to happiness or desperate attempts to hold on to the good things in your life.”

While Bloom has been doing well (she was happy this season!), we can’t forget her past struggles. “Bloom is a former addict,” Horton reminds us. “She’s not good at depriving herself of what she wants and she’s really found something she’s never had before with Leyla. She’s found a genuine love. When she’s faced with doing the right thing and losing her or doing the wrong thing and keeping her, she just can’t help herself. She’s got an addict sensibility, but she’s also a good person. So she knows what she’s done is wrong.”

Expect to see this weigh on their relationship going forward as Leyla begins working for Bloom and remains in the dark about just how she scored that spot. “How does a secret like that eat away at the foundation of a relationship and a love affair? It’s a little like having an affair. Once you have a secret in a relationship with somebody, it’s not benign, it eats away, it lives, it impacts things,” Horton continues. “It’s full of potential conflict and pending disasters because of the decisions that she’s made.”

Iggy’s Drastic Decision

In the penultimate episode of Season 3, the patient, Chance (Luke Slattery), Iggy had taken a restraining order out against broke into his house. To keep him calm and get him to leave, the psychiatrist had to lie. (“You finally put yourself first,” his husband Martin, played by Mike Doyle, told him.) As a result of that trauma, Iggy decided in the finale that he is no longer going to see patients.

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“Chance made Iggy rethink his entire life,” Schulner explains. “The speech that Aaron [Ginsburg] and David [Foster] wrote for him at the end, where he’s looking at his family, making smores around the campfire, and realizing he doesn’t want to make that trade anymore, he doesn’t want to absorb other people’s pain if it means sacrificing from his own joy — and because Iggy doesn’t know how to be a different therapist because he can’t help but opening his heart to everyone — I think he’s making a really healthy decision. Why should he keep practicing and keep hurting himself?”

But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for him to stick to that decision. On the one hand, “the peace he has with his family is everything to him,” Schulner says. But on the other hand, “there’s the problem of his nature,” Horton adds. “His nature is to help people directly. That is who he is. It’s one of the reasons that he and Martin have adopted so many kids from foreign countries because he can’t help himself. He’s made a conscious decision that goes against his very nature. He’s determined to follow it, but those liminal conflicts where your nature is your nature and you’re trying to impose a will on it eventually have to collide with each other — that’s what his next season is going to be about. How does he resolve that conflict? It’s a powerful conflict.”

New Amsterdam, Season 4, Fall 2021, NBC